Don’t you remember telling me that warming was caused by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, and that variations in the Sun’s activities are too weak to drive warming?

Well maybe the Sun is too weak to drive warming, but apparently it can slow down and cause cooling, even when carbon dioxide is going up.

Actually, this current cycle of warming, following the previous cycle of cooling called the Little Ice Age, looks a lot like the Medieval Warm Period of 1,000 years ago, which followed the cool period of The Dark Ages.

In fact, just in the 18,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age – when sea levels were over four hundred feet lower and a mile-thick ice sheet covered Chicago – there were three major climate change cycles, and two of the warm periods were much warmer than the current one.

Now there are ominous signs that the current warming trend is fizzling out. From January 2007 to January 2008 we have experienced the largest one year drop in temperature ever recorded. Of course, you will have to excuse me for using the same sort of alarmist and apocalyptic rhetoric that Al Gore and his Acolytes use to describe short-term weather phenomena when it’s warming.

According to the believers that anthropogenic global warming is upon us and will destroy civilization, each heat wave, every strong hurricane, any droughts, most floods, Midwestern tornados, a drowned polar bear, an early Spring, and just about any weather event “out of the ordinary,” is a sign that man-caused global warming is here.

However, we’ve already seen how temperatures were cooler for thirty years (1945-1975) while CO2 increased steadily. How temperatures rose more rapidly in thirty years (1915-1945) than in the sixty years since. We’ve seen how Arctic Ice in the Winter this year (February 2008) is the same as it was February 1980, and how it fluctuates in forty year cycles caused by wind-driven warm currents, not atmospheric warming.

The bottom line is that Alice and I can't count on Gualala getting warmer as we get older. We don't want to be like all the other old folk, who can't take cold weather anymore and move to Florida or Arizona. We want it warmer, and we want to stay put.